Guts and Glory

My first instinct when loading up Guts and Glory was to check whether it was a racing game or a fever dream. Technically, Steam calls it a racing game. Practically, it is an obstacle course survival game where the goal is getting your ragdoll rider from point A to point B while landmines, spinning saw blades, wrecking balls, and cannon fire try to separate your limbs from your body in the most theatrical way possible. Think Happy Wheels with full 3D physics and a slightly bigger budget for cartoon gore. The cast of playable characters is the game's best feature. You start with John, a dad pedaling a bicycle with a passenger perched in a rear child seat, which immediately sets the tone. From there you unlock Earl on a quad bike, the Yang family piled into a wobbly open-top sedan, Jack and Jill on a bike-and-trailer combo, Zoe on a rocket-boosted motorbike, and the wonderfully absurd Lawn Chair Larry propelling himself through the air on a propane-powered rocket wheelchair. Each one handles differently and has tracks loosely tied to their character, which keeps the format from going completely stale. Zoe rewards speed and commitment through obstacles; the Yangs require a delicate touch on corners that their car absolutely does not have. The manual driver ejection mechanic, where you can launch your rider off the vehicle to leap for a checkpoint or shave seconds off a time, is the kind of thing that sounds like a gimmick and ends up being genuinely clutch. The level editor is a serious piece of kit for a solo-dev indie. You get over 500 items to place, including pedestrians, AI traffic, arrow turrets, poop cannons (yes, really), destructible fences, and more hazard types than any reasonable person needs. The Steam Workshop integration means the community has been generating tracks since Early Access, which adds real longevity past the nine built-in challenge sets. On PC that workshop library is a genuine selling point. The checkpoint system has two flavors: yellow markers that track your goal with no save, and orange ones that respawn you in place but are spaced inconsistently far apart. When an orange checkpoint fails to register after a brutal run, you will feel it in your back teeth. That is the game's most legitimate frustration, and it comes up often enough to matter. Solo, Guts and Glory burns hot and fast. The first two or three hours are genuinely funny in a way that makes you want to show someone else the screen. After that, the formula repeats and the humor gets thinner without fresh context. No split-screen, no local multiplayer of any kind, so the "four drunk friends" test only applies if you are passing the controller. Crowd-watching mode is real though: this is one of those rare games where the person watching has almost as much fun as the person playing, because every death is physics-driven and therefore unpredictable. Keyboard controls are rough; grab a controller and the handling improves meaningfully. Performance on PC is generally fine, though the occasional framerate wobble during heavy gore moments is a known issue that has never been fully ironed out. Guts and Glory is best understood as a short-session laugh machine with genuine replay value on PC thanks to the workshop. It is not a serious time-trial racer, and it is not a game with a long story to invest in. Squeamish players should know the gore is front and center, though there is an option to dial it down or, if you are that kind of person, crank it up further. Expect two to four hours of genuine entertainment, then a slow fade unless the level editor or leaderboard chasing hooks you.

Riley · Scout Team

Sports & racing

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